MUERTE
CONTENTS
01
Introduction
05
Death Architecture
06
The stillborns
20
88 Ghats
27
Vestiges of space
40
Scale to Opress
50
Credits
DEATH ARCHITECTURE
MUERTE Death Architecture #4 December 2018 Editor: Ernesto Perez Rea Junca
Previous page and cover: Reinterpretation of illustration Cenotaph for Newton by Etienne-Louis Boullee
MUERTE
We don’t want to die. Nowadays we are surrounded by a term that bombs us in our everyday life: wellness. We are obsessed with prolonging life - eat clean, quit drinking, take drugs under medical control, exercise, reduce stress, yoga- do everything possible to expand our lifespan the most until our mind doesn’t realize we are dying anymore. 21st century generations avoid talking about death as if denying it will erase the only certainty we have the moment we are born. In 2014, Dying Matters, a British coalition of individual and organisational members which aims to help people talk more openly about dying, death and bereavement, made a survey in which eight of ten people were found uncomfortable talking about dying and death. The “demonization” of death is quite recent; according to the philanthropist Satish Modi, “In the late 19th century, the standard of life used to be much lower and people died much earlier. The time people had on this planet was very limited – the average life expectancy was around 48 [by 1901]. Nowadays people can expect to live into the high 90s. In the Victorian era, people understood that they had little time left to live a life, and they confronted and talked about mortality, operations and medicine as people around them died. Now the lifespan has increased, people don’t talk about it.”
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In ancient societies, there was always a ritual for death events. People followed its procedures and learned from it, they spent their whole life preparing for its biggest life event. Since the very beginning of human kind, societies developed and built pyramids, tombs, mausoleums, mastabas, among many other typologies of funerary architecture. Now we are completely unprepared for death as if its denial will save us from it. Maybe its got something to do with our capitalist system kind of society this constant denial. Death depresses the market, it doesn’t sell. Death removes customers from the marketplace and sadness other customers, it’s not affordable. There is a necessity to remove death from the contemporary city: “no mourning, no funerals anymore. Traffic cannot stop, shops cannot close. No Lent, no Muharram. Always Christmas, always Mardi Gras.” (San Rocco Magazine) Death is essential. Without death there is no meaning or importance in anything we do. Our limited time transforms goals into achievements and achievements into transcendence. What meaning would life have without dead? Peter Saul, an emergency doctor, in a conference in 2011, showed graphs about four different ways of death and how common it is each of those nowadays: Sudden death, which has become very rare. Terminal illness, which happens to younger people, since by the time you’ve reached 80 this is unlikely to happen anymore, only one of ten people will die of cancer. The big growth industry are organ failure and frailty. The first one, means an admission to an intensive care hospital in which at some point someone says enough is enough and the doctors stop. The second one is the most common in our time (6 out of 10 people will die of this) which is the dwindling of capacity. A candle light fading away. The void is waiting. We must be conscious of how the worst thing that could possibly
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happen, will happen. The end of our individual world. A personal apocalypse.
MUERTE is a fanzine that confronts death, which is published monthly. It is designed for a four months plan, in which each of the four editions will speak about death related topics approached from architecture, design, photography, philosophy and literature. MUERTE aims to explore the relation between human and death with the premise that its crucial for our society to prepare and confront for the inevitable.
(Publication themes are being selected from the Call For Papers of San Rocco’s Magazine.)
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Reinterpretation of Adolf Loos's Dvorak mausoleum. The mausoleum was never built; but a scale version of it was realised by the British architect Sam Jacob as a temporary installation called A Very Small Part of Archi tecture commissioned by the Architecture Foundation at London's Highgate Cemetery in September 2016.
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DEATH ARCHITECTURE
This fourth and last edition, seeks to analyse the existing relationship between architecture and death. Time can be a harsh judge for the human built environment, he decides what lives for ever and what doesn’t. This edition presents different subjects analysis which in some way or the other involve death and the creation or destruction of space.
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THE STILLBORNS
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Venice Hospital. Le Corbusier.
In 1965, the French Suisse architect after being commissioned for the Olivetti headquarters in the outskirts of Milan, was reached by the city of Venice to build a new hospital for people with serious or terminal illness. This building would have been built in the neighbourhood of San Giobbe. ArchDaily, an architecture website, describes how the project did not stand out from the rest of the city as a modernist monster which stood out of the Venetian landscape and urban context. In fact, he made use of the existing urban vocabulary to appear “as a seamless continuation of the old city. The hospital was conceived as a network of interconnected modules clustered around several square courtyards, a clear analogue for Venice’s traditional urban fabric. As with the rest of the city’s buildings, the new hospital was supported by a number of piles driven into the Venetian silt. However, these were not typical wooden piles; in reference to his own design canon, Le Corbusier chose instead to perch the hospital atop a grid of his trademark concrete pillars, or pilotis. The overall intent was that the new hospital would extend the urban fabric rather than interrupt it.”1
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1 AD Classics: Venice Hospital / Le Corbusier. Luke Friederer. Archdaily. October 2018. 2 The Building Is the City: Le Cor busier's Unbuilt Hospital In Ven ice. Fabrizi, Mariabruni. Socks Studio. May 2014.
Previous page: Jan van Riemsdyk, The Anatonomy of the Hu man Gravid Uterus, 1764. Copperplate engraving. National Library of Medicine.
Since Le Corbusier’s declaration of “une maison est une machineà-habiter” (“a house is a machine for living”), he kept his ideology of architecture as efficient as a machine. In the Venetian hospital he kept this premise by creating different modules, almost identical, with 28 patient rooms facing into corridors. This system was planned to allow the future expansion of the hospital if necessary. The hospital was also arranged vertically based on the program each space would house: administrative and entry services were located at the ground level, patient bedrooms were on the top floor, and all other hospital program needs on the level between the two.2 One curious aspect of the design was the lack of conventional windows in the care units. The only daylight to enter the space did so through clerestory windows along the inner corridor walls of each hospital room1; an American journal considered this an “unkindness,” as it denied patients the opportunity to gaze out at the Venetian lagoon during their stay.1 Le Corbusier died later on during the same year that the commission was made and, due to different political debates over the value of the hospital and his death, the project never came to life.
This page: Model of "New Venice Hospital" by Le Corbusier. From The Building is the City: Le Corbusier's Unbuilt Hospital in Venice. Mariabruna Fabrizi. Socks Studio. 2014 Next page top: Hospital's distribution plan. From The Building is the City: Le Cor busier's Unbuilt Hospital in Venice. Mariabruna Fabrizi. Socks Studio. 2014 Next page bottom: Plan and section of Le Corbusier's project. From The Building is the City: Le Corbusier's Unbuilt Hospital in Venice. Mariabruna Fabrizi. Socks Studio. 2014
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Palazzo dei Congressi. Louis Kahn.
This page: Sketch made by Kahn of the palace project. CLP1968 Website. Next page: Louis Kahn, Modello del progetto di Louis Kahn per il Palazzo dei Congressi ai Giardini. CLP1968 Website.
Venice has been since 1846 (the year in which the connecting train of the island with the mainland was built) in a constant fight between progress and traditionalism. During 1972, the city of Venice was searching for an architect for the new Congress Palace which was decided to be commissioned to Louis Kahn. Kahn’s proposal was made first by using sculpture instead of drawings: he made a model of Venice in clay in which he only three important landmarks: Piazza de San Marco, Le Corbusier’s hospital proposal, and his own project. The first proposal was planned to be in the Biennale’s Giardini at the eastern end of the island, but this location was denied. He was then asked to make a proposal for the Arsenale, a military compound next to the place he had previously proposed. With the location change, he had to create a new proposal in which he made a more poetic architectural maneuver: the palace was turned into a bridge that went over the Canale delle Galeazze. The public space was placed on a roof terrace transforming the structure to become a Palazzo and a piazza in a single gesture. “While Kahn was commissioned at the Mayor’s behest and
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worked closely with the local government throughout the project, his proposal was ultimately rejected by city officials after six years of work. Much like Le Corbusier’s hospital, the Palazzo dei Congressi was deemed too anomalous of an element to blend into the historical urban fabric of Venice; the design’s references to Venetian and Sienese landmarks were an insufficient counter to its undeniable formal Modernity. The city’s health commissioner, Vito Chiarelli, had written a letter to Kahn shortly after the architect was commissioned specifically to warn him that Venice had an “innate inability to accept abstract forms embedded in its historic context.”3 “Many contemporary projects in the vein of Kahn’s fell victim to Venice’s mid-century historicism, never progressing beyond models or the drawings. It is up to the observer to determine if this obstinate preservation of the city’s pre-war urban fabric was justified, or if new landmarks like Kahn’s Palazzo dei Congressi could have captured a new architectural glory to rival that of the splendour, and innovative attitude, of the former Venetian Republic.” 3
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3 AD Classics: Palazzo dei Con gresi / Louis Kahn. Luke Friederer. Archdaily. June 2016.
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The Masieri Memorial. Frank L. Wright.
4 AAVV 1988, Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 1951- 1959, A.D.A. EDITA, Tokyo.
In 1965 Angelo Masieri asked Frank Lloyd Wright to make a house project for him on the Canal Grande, but sadly when Masieri was on his way to Lloyd Wright’s studio to speak to him directly, he and his wife had a car accident in which unfortunately, Masieri died. His wife, after his death, decided to change the program of the building to an Architecture Faculty students’ hostel, which Wright agreed and began creating a proposal. In 1953, Wright wrote a letter to Savina, Masieri’s wife, some general ideas he had for the building’s triangular parcel in which the building was meant to be built: “…the building affords views up and down the canal where no one in Venice ever looked beforetwo corners of the room. This is modern; so are all the techniques. Alongside these corner features, a glass lightning feature riseslightning outside and inside by the way of neon tubes (low candlepower) when appropriate. […] The material I’ve selected for your approval is a thin marble slab with edges each way. […] The floors are concrete suspended from the roof beams by iron rods concealed in the partitions. The roof is garden.” 4
Previous double page: Proyect model. Public Archive for Venice, Washington University Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts. Carlos Jimenez Studio. Next page: Masieri Foundation. Reedit. 2010
The building was not approved by the local government due to the non-compliance of the construction law which didn’t let the building to have the façade modified (between many others). In 1968, Carlo Scarpa resumed the project which, despite the strength and difficulty, remained in 1973. Scarpa changed only the interior and, because of the Grand Canal facades modification law, he only separated the façade from the floors with an iron structure. When Scarpa died in 1979, the work was only partially underway. The project was completed under the direction of several collaborators such as architect and engineer Franca Semi Maschietto.
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Torre Bicentenario. Rem Koolhaas. From OMA’s website: 5 Torre Bicentenario. Proyects. OMA Official Website
“Compared with the world’s other economically ascendant regions such as Asia and the Middle East, Latin America has a skyscraper deficit. Poised to harness the economic and symbolic potential of the Bicentennial, Mexico City will celebrate a historic moment with the emergence of a new skyscraper, the Torre Bicentenario. In an architectural age defined by the pursuit of expression at all costs, the Torre Bicentenario is a building whose unique form is responsive rather than frivolous; a building whose form facilitates rather than complicates its use: the stacking of two pyramidal forms produces a building simultaneously familiar and unexpected, historic yet visionary. Skyscrapers tend to internalize their features. Atriums typically create dramatic spaces within, hidden from the city around them. Here, a void cuts through the building’s widest point, providing access to light and natural ventilation and creating a relationship between the floors within. Public programs are located at the junction of the two pyramids, at 100 m, the datum of the buildings that surround it. A pattern of reflective glass panels covering 50 percent of the interior surface maximizes light penetration. The void twists at its midpoint, opening at the bottom toward the park and at the top toward the city. Rather than exacerbating the skyscraper’s isolation, it connects the building to its surroundings. The building bulges toward Chapultepec park and the historic city centre along the axis of the Reforma.
Next page: Torre Bicentenario's model from two different perspectives. OMA Official Website.
The site of the Torre Bicentenario lies at the northeastern corner of Chapultepec Park, adjacent to the interchange of two major highways. Located at the edge of the park, major infrastructure and the city, the project has the potential to benefit all three. A chain of high-rises runs along the Reforma and continues around the park. The Torre Bicentenario will extend this line of buildings around the park.
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The two districts adjacent to the Torre Bicentenario, Las Lomas and Polanco, are separated by two major highways and their interchange. To provide a link between them, a new pedestrian bridge extends from the Torre Bicentenario to the east, crossing over the Periferico highway, establishing a shortcut that reconnects formerly disengaged sections of the park and the city.” 5 The project provoked controversy mainly because the location where it was going to be built is classified as historical, it would occupy about 3500 m2 of the Chapultepec forest for parking and it violated the regulations of the Urban Development Plan of the delegation. On September 27, 2007, the head of government of the Federal District officially announced that the project was cancelled due to the legal problems of the property.
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Palacio Louvre. Francesco Borromini.
The great baroque architect Francesco Borromini was called by the King Louis XIV, also known as the sun king, to make a proposal for the east façade of the Louvre. The project was made under the rules and style of the typical Counter-reformation architecture that was being built in Italy and Spain. For diverse reasons, the project was given to the French architects Louis Le Vau and Claude Perrault which then made what is known today as one of the maximum exponents of the French baroque, also known as aristocratic or classical baroque.
Western Wall Plaza. Jerusalem.
This page: Borromini's Louvre proposal. Larousse. France Next page: Superstudio's visionary marterplan for Jerusalem Werster Wall.Photo by Archipanic.
Immediately after Israel captured Jerusalem’s Old City during the 1967 war it bulldozed the Mugharbe Quarter off the area adjacent to the Western Wall. National, municipal and military authorities agreed that the corridor between the neighbourhood and the wall was too narrow for a nation to gather and ‘meet its past.’ Once the post war stream of pilgrims reduced, Israelis were taken by surprise. The central assembly space of the State of Israel, and the holiest site for Jews since Titus destroyed Herod’s Second Temple
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in A.D. 70, became an amorphous field of debris and awesome stones. Captivated by the site, architects harried to propose designs for the plaza. Louis Kahn, Isamu Noguchi, Aronson and Kutcher, Fisher and Maestro, Denys Lasdun, and Superstudio contended the much debated yet authorized design of Moshe Safdie. Clearly, neither Safdie nor his contenders suggested mere design solutions for such a complicated site. Their proposals were fierce manifestos in two distinct yet closely connected battles. One was over the balance between Judaism and Statehood in a rapidly transforming Israeli society. The other was over the course that modern architecture should take after the dissolution of CIAM. This national-architectural controversy demanded great political and emotional investment. 6 Unborn projects which, once again, were deprived from life due to different political, cultural and social problems.
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6 Designing the Western Wall Plaď€ za: National and Architectural controversies. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan. MIT, Centre of Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts.
88 GHATS
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The word ghat comes from the hindi, Ghāṭ (घाट), which means “step”, referring to a staircase, a stairway or bleachers which lead to a water body such as a river, pond, pool or lake. Commonly, the word is associated to areas of holy cities next to a sacred river, such as the Ganges or the Yamuna. This are of great importance for Hinduism ritual’s, and for this reason they are very common in India. However, most of them are used for neither sacred or mundane purposes (simple hygiene). Along the riverside, there are specific ghats for cremations. This way, the ashes of the dead can be washed away with holy river. The city of Varanasi, India, houses 88 ghats which were built during the Maratha Empire Period (1700 AD). Nowadays many of these are associated with legends or mythologies and most of them serve as bath and puja7 ceremony ghats except for two which are exclusively for cremations.
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7 a prayer ritual performed by Hindus of devotional worship to one or more deities, to host and honor a guest or to spiritually celebrate an event. The word “pūjā” is Sanskrit, and means reverence, honour, homage, adoration, and worship.
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During the last decades there has been a significant pollution of the river which has changed the way these places are lived. The river has become a disposal centre of industrial waste, domestic sewage and because of the human cremations.
8 The Pyres of Varanasi: Break ing the Cycle of Death and Re birth. Pete McBride. Published August 7, 2014.
In 2013, National Photography’s photographer Pete McBride, travelled almost all the Ganges River and tracked the activities going on in the sacred river which was later published in the National Geographic magazine. 8
Since many believe Varanasi has been inhabited for 5,000 years (which would make it one of the world’s oldest cities), it is considered to be the most sacred of cities on the banks of the Ganges River. People come from all over to pray, collect sacred water, bathe, and yes, attend to their dead. Some even come to die. […] […] Like most things in India, though, there is a parallel story. The demand for wood, particularly hard wood, taxes Himalayan forests. Burning one large body can require up to 1,100 pounds of logs. In turn 50 to 60 million trees are consumed annually in India alone. Electric or gas-fired crematoriums have been built but both depend on unreliable energy sources and so most still prefer traditional methods. As the sun continued to rise, I noticed three boats towering with timber coming downstream. Raj pointed out one electrical crematorium nearby. It was closed. Not everyone can afford the cost of funeral pyres either. Even the cheapest wood is beyond the reach for much of the poor. Many bodies are discarded into the Ganges partially cremated or not at all. Estimates say 100,000 bodies of various cremation levels are tossed into the Ganges each year.
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Previous page top: The burning ghat in Varanasi, India's oldest city, glows as burning pyres continue through the night. Photo by Pete McBride for National Geographic. 2o14. Previous page bottom: Varanasi is the only city in India where pyres burn 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Because the city is believed to be so sacred, the demand for funerals here is high. Photo by Pete McBride for National Geographic. 2o14.
It is not uncommon to see partially decomposed bodies floating downstream. I saw one in the foothills upstream and it stopped me in my tracks. My immediate, naive response was to contact the police. By 9 a.m., the Indian sun blazed above the Ganges. Three fires were now burning. My hair was covered in ash and I was pouring sweat again. As I walked through the wood-splitting area, an old woman suddenly emerged from the shadows and held out her hand, the international request for money. Raj, guiding us out, casually said, “She lives here. Her family left her. She has come to die and needs money for cremation. Want to donate some rupees for her wood?”8
This page: Aghora Puja. The Aghori have a profound connection with the dead. Death is not a fearsome concept, but a passing from the world of illusion. Photo from Holy men of Varanasi, India by Joey L. Behance Next page top: On the upper deck of Varanasi's burning ghat, pigeons fly above the steaming ashes and bone fragments of a funeral pyre. Photo by Pete McBride for National Geographic. 2o14. Next page bottom: Photo from TripSavvy.
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Vestiges of space
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Albergo Diurno Venezia, Milan, Italy. Under the Piazza Oberdan in Milan, near Via Tadino, it remains the vestiges of what once was a day hotel. The project was planned and built between 1923 and 1925, opening officially on January 18 of 1926. Piero Portallupi, the architect, designed the 88 meters long underground hotel which was divided into two parts: the public baths and the hall of artisans, each part connected to two different streets. Some of the programme you could find on the public baths was six luxury bathrooms with bath tubs, simple baths with showers and spaces to do different activities such as haircutting rooms. In 1985 the baths were shut down. In 1990 the structure was given in concession to the Consorzio Oberdan Servizi, created by the artisans that worked there. Most of the artisans left the Diurno in the middle of 1990, selling a part of the furniture that they considered their own. The last barber for men, Carmine Aiello, was sent away by Milan on June 16, 2006, for legal reasons. Afterwards, following the break of a skylight by the wheel of a cleaning truck, the skylights were covered with asphalt outside and reinforced inside.9
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9 Albero Diurno Venezia. Wikipedia contributors. Wikipedia. October 2018.
Previous page: Taiwan Pod Houses by Yeowatzup. This page: Inside of the abandoned Albergo Diurno Venezia. Photo from the Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI)
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Buffalo Central Terminal, United States. The historic former railroad station in Buffalo, New York, was active from 1929 to 1979. The building, built in an art deco style, was designed by Fellheimer & Wagner and it is a 17-floors high building. Throughout history it has changed severaltimes the ownership because of the financial problems the owners have had.10
10 National Register of Historical Place: New York (NY), Erie County. National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. February, 2007. 11 All text was taken from: Histo ry: The Mountain and The Ar chitect. Buzludzha Monument Website.
Buzludzha, Bulgaria.11 The Buzludzha Memorial House was opened in August 1981, commemorating a location with great significance in Bulgarian history. Three key historic events are linked to this mountain peak: the 1868 death of Hadzhi Dimitâr, a WWII-era battle between fascists and partisan forces, and most significantly, the foundation of the Bulgarian Social Democratic Workers Party in 1891. The political changes that swept across Bulgaria during the early 1990s ushered in a new era of democracy but as the country opened its borders to western culture and capitalism, there was no place left for monuments to socialism. The Buzludzha monument was closed, sitting in limbo for half a decade on its mountain peak. By the late 1990s Bulgaria was facing economic crises and an uncertain future. Many citizens blamed the former regime, and from 1997 onwards the conservative and passionately anti-communist government under Prime Minister Ivan Kostov began the dismantling of various notable communist-era monuments. The mausoleum’s demolition was conducted even after an opinion poll reported that two-thirds of the population opposed the idea. Around that same time, Kostov’s government dismissed the
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Previous page: Inside of the abandoned Albergo Diurno Venezia. Photo from the Fondo Ambiente Italiano (FAI)
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Previous page: Buffalo Central Station abandoned building. Photo taken from the Midwest High Speed Rail Association Website. This page: Aerial photo of the Buzludzha monument. Photo taken from the Buzludzha Monument Offical Website.
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guards who had been protecting the Buzludzha Monument and left the building open to the public. In August 1999, Kostov’s government used bulldozers and explosives to destroy the Mausoleum of Georgi Dimitrov: a white marble tomb in the centre of Sofia, that had contained the remains of Bulgaria’s first communist leader.
Casa Sperimental/Casa Albero/ Villa Perguini, Fregene, Italia. Designed by the architect Giuseppe Perugini, during the late 60’s the Casa Sperimental was built in Fregene, Italy. The brutalist building is surrounded by tall trees which make the place seem as if it was floating or as a nest in which you can find refugee. The primary materials used for the construction of the house were concrete, steel and glass.
Previous page top: Photo from Concreto Experimental. Arquine . 2016. Previous page bottom: Photo from Concreto Experimental. Arquine . 2016. This page: Sketch of Giuseppe Perugini's Casa Sperimentale. DC Hiller
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Cine Opera, Mexico Opened in 1949, Cine Opera was one of the most popular cinemas in Mexico City. As time went by, the building lost popularity until 1993 when it was retaken as a concert hall. During a concert in 1998, there was a riot which caused the permanent closure of the compound.
Hashima Island, Japan Due to the quick industrialization that Japan suffered during the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th, islands such as this began to be built in Japan’s archipelago. The island is located 15 kilometres away from Nagasaki and nowadays is one of the 505 uninhabited islands in Nagasaki Prefecture.12 The island was established in 1887 due to the undersea coal
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mines present in the area. Then, almost fifty years later, the site became a reminder of a place of forced labour prior to and during the WWII.12
12 Hashima Island. Wikipedia Contributors. Wikipedia. November, 2018.
It is said that one of the first concrete buildings in Japan was constructed here and during 1917, a block of apartments was built, which became the tallest building in the country. Also, the island has one of the highest population density rates ever registered in human history: in 1959, there was a population of 139 100 inhabitants in the island of only one square kilometre.12 In 1974, with the coal reserves nearing depletion, the mine was closed, and all of the residents departed soon after, leaving the island effectively abandoned for the following three decades.12
Previous page : Cine Opera. Photo by Moises Pablo for Cuarto Oscuro Website. This page: On the island of Hashima during the 1950's. Photo from Facebook page Battleshipisland. The conversation Magazine.
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Maunsell Sea Forts, United Kingdom
13 The abandoned 'alien' forts of Britain's coast. BBC. March 2016
The Maunsell Forts are armed towers built in the Thames and Mersey estuaries during the Second World War to help defend the United Kingdom. They were operated as army and navy forts, and named after their designer, Guy Maunsell. The forts were decommissioned in the late 1950s and later used for other activities including pirate radio broadcasting.13 In the summers of 2007 and 2008 Red Sands Radio, a station commemorating the pirate radio stations of the 1960s, operated from the Red Sands fort on 28-day Restricted Service Licences. The fort was subsequently declared unsafe, and Red Sands Radio has moved its operations ashore to Whitstable.13
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Previous page and this page top: London Pirate Radio. Maunsell Sea Forts. Dprbcn Wordpress Website. This page bottom: Photo from OrangeSmile Tours.
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Sanzhi Pod Houses, Taiwan14 14 All text was taken from San zhi UFO Houses, Taiwan by Michiel Van Iersel. Failed Architecture Website. September, 2010.
The Sanzhi UFO houses, also known as the Sanzhi pod houses or Sanzhi Pod City, were a set of abandoned pod-shaped buildings that resembled Futuro houses, the prefabricated flying saucer shaped house designed by Matti Suuronen. The UFO houses were constructed beginning in 1978. They were intended as a vacation resort in a part of the northern coast adjacent to Danshui, and were marketed towards U.S. military officers coming from their East Asian postings. However, the project was abandoned in 1980 due to investment losses and several fatal car accidents during construction. The buildings were scheduled to be torn down in late 2008, despite an online petition to retain one of the structures as a museum. Demolition work on the site began on 29 December 2008, with plans to redevelop the site into a tourist attraction with hotels and beach facilities.
This page: Taiwan POD Houses. Reedit. Source unkown. Next page: The ruins of the future. The Sanzhi UFO Houses in Taiwan. Ian Smith. Wikimedia Commons.
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Scale to opress 15 The Metapolis Dictionary of ad vanced architecture. City, tech nology and society in the infor mation age. Manuel Gausa.
Next page: Modell Reichsautobahn-Einfahrt bei Salzburg. Federal German Archive. Photographer unkown. 1936
Throughout human history, the psychological and physical connotations the manipulation of space comprehends, has been used to reflect an ideological system present at certain historical moment. There is no surprise when you understand why dictators have such a great love and admiration for architecture: a building is a strong statement based on a system of ideas present at a given time. Between the many compositional elements that constitute a building, totalitarian and authoritarian regimes have special interest for one: scale. The culprit of making us feel safe or unsafe, small or big, important or insignificant, powerful or powerless, limited or unlimited, among many others. Scale, which it is not “a measure nor dimension, but capacity for relation”15, is the primary weapon to impose power and control over the social imaginary.
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Adolf Hitler’s selection of a specific and personal architect was not random. He needed someone who could materialize his ideas and beliefs, demonstrate his authority, and what a better way to do this than by using the gigantic scale along with typologies and elements from Ancient Imperial Rome architecture.
16 Albert Speer. Wikipedia Contributors. Wikipedia. November 2018.
Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s architect, joined the Nazi Party in 1931, launching himself on a political and governmental career which lasted fourteen years. His architectural skills made him increasingly prominent within the Party and he became a member of Hitler’s inner circle to the point that in 1942, Hitler appointed him as Reich Minister of Armaments and War Production.16 Later on, he designed and constructed places such as the Zeppeinfeld stadium in Nuremberg, the Reich’s Chancellery, and even an urban master plan for Berlin.
18 Mazzoni, Angiolo. Archivi degli Architetti Website. 2003
17 Fascist Architecture. Wikipedia Contributors. Wikipedia. November 2018.
19 Soviet Architecture: Construc tivist Architecture, Aswan Dam, Tbilisi Roads Ministry Building, Microdistrict, Narkomtiazhprom, Panelhaz. Books LLC. 2010.
It doesn’t require any architectural knowledge to know the impact of Speer’s building scale had in oneself. You can feel the power and authority of the Nazi regime by just looking at a picture of the Cathedral of Light above the Zeppelintribune or one of the New Reich’s Chancellery garden portal which has a great resonance to a Roman temple. Fascist architecture, as it is known today, gained popularity in the late 1920s with the rise of modernism along with the nationalism associated with fascist governments in western Europe.17 Benito Mussolini, just as Hitler, had his personal architects which developed aswell the same ideals as Roman Imperial architecture. Angiolo Mazzoni, was the engineer and architect that worked for Mussolini’s regime and nowadays it is considered one of the most important architects in the post-war period. In 1920, he worked as a designer in Marcello Piacentini’s studio (Benito Mussolini’s favourite architect) and later on, he mainly built train stations and postal service buildings.18 Architecture as a tool of oppression and power was not only used by the fascist regimes, as mentioned before, most of the totalitar-
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Previous page: Adolf Hitler visits Paris with architect Albert Speer (left) and artist Arno Breker (right), June 23, 1940. This image from the US National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) was originally copyrighted by the Presse Illustrationen Hoffmann (Heinrich Hoffmann, Berlin SW68 Kochstrasse 10) and was seized by the US government after World War II and vested by the United States Attorney General as US government property in 1951. It is considered public domain because it was not divested.
ian or authoritarian regimes made use of the discipline. Another example could be Joseph Stalin’s architecture which, actually, is known today as Stalinist Architecture due to the specific characteristics the buildings constructed during his term had. Along Stalin’s mandate, the government had a strong influence during the design and construction processes in the USSR. The constructions had massive proportions, rigidity, sobriety, and based on symmetrical relations. Most of this architecture was developed between 1933, “when Boris Iofan’s draft for Palace of the Soviets was officially approved, and 1955, when Nikita Khrushchev condemned “excesses” of the past decades and disbanded the Soviet Academy of Architecture.”19 It is scary to think the power architecture has had along humankind. As neither a power of mass destruction and oppression or a weapon of peace and equality. Currently the role of architecture has been degraded and its importance in societies has been forgotten, but as history is condemned to be cyclic, in the near-future its indispensable, necessary and important role will probably be re-established.
This page: Photo from What Was Stalinist Architecture? by Shree Raj. 2018. Next Page: Cathedral of Light. Reedit. Photographer Unkown.
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This page: The Volkshalle (People's Hall), was a huge monumental building planned by Adolf Hitler and his architect Albert Speer. Next page: Colonia Villa Rosa. Angiolo Mazzoni.
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Credits
1 AD Classics: Venice Hospital / Le Corbusier. Luke Friederer. Archdaily. October 2018. 2 The Building Is the City: Le Corbusier's Unbuilt Hospital In Ven ice. Fabrizi, Mariabruni. Socks Studio. May 2014. 3 AD Classics: Palazzo dei Congresi / Louis Kahn. Luke Friederer. Archdaily. June 2016. 4 AAVV 1988, Frank Lloyd Wright Monograph 1951- 1959, A.D.A. EDITA, Tokyo. 5 Torre Bicentenario. Proyects. OMA Official Website 6 Designing the Western Wall Plaza: National and Architectural controversies. Alona Nitzan-Shiftan. MIT, Centre of Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts. 8 The Pyres of Varanasi: Breaking the Cycle of Death and Rebirth. Pete McBride. Published August 7, 2014. 9 Albero Diurno Venezia. Wikipedia contributors. Wikipedia. October 2018.
Previous page: The Cathedral of Light above the Zeppelintribune. German Federal Archives. 1936
10 National Register of Historical Place: New York (NY), Erie County. National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. February, 2007.
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11 All text was taken from: History: The Mountain and The Architect. Buzludzha Monument Website. 12 Hashima Island. Wikipedia Contributors. Wikipedia. November, 2018. 13 The abandoned 'alien' forts of Britain's coast. BBC. March 2016 14 All text was taken from Sanzhi UFO Houses, Taiwan by Michiel Van Iersel. Failed Architecture Website. September, 2010. 15 The Metapolis Dictionary of advanced architecture. City, technol ogy and society in the information age. Manuel Gausa. 16 Albert Speer. Wikipedia Contributors. Wikipedia. November 2018. 17 Fascist Architecture. Wikipedia Contributors. Wikipedia. November 2018. 18 Mazzoni, Angiolo. Archivi degli Architetti Website. 2003 19 Soviet Architecture: Constructivist Architecture, Aswan Dam, Tbilisi Roads Ministry Building, Microdistrict, Narkomtiazhprom, Panelhaz. Books LLC. 2010. All images references are specified on the text. If you would like to contribute to MUERTE, please contact the editor on: ernestoprj@hotmail.com
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